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‘Put Ken Lay in Jail’ |
“I’m hoping they not only put Ken Lay in jail—they need to take the millions he kept and put it in a special fund to give some back to people who lost their 401(k)s and retirement,” says Digna Showers.
She and Deborah Perrotta are just two of the 21,000 former Enron employees who lost everything when Enron nose-dived five years ago in a mire of strange Nigerian boat deals and bogus companies with junior high school-inspired names like “Raptor.”
Now ex-Enron bosses Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling have shed the Hawaiian leis from their famous company parties for quality time in a Texas courtroom where they are facing charges they defrauded Enron and lied about it to the investing public.
“Ken Lay thinks people are stupid. He had to know,” Showers says of Lay’s defense that he wasn’t aware the company he founded likely was cooking the books and executives were bailing out of a sinking ship even as they were telling workers and investors to keep putting their money into what was by then a financial black hole.
“I despise both of them,” says Perrotta, who was unable to make mortgage payments after she lost her job at the same time as her husband lost his. “I don’t trust them and I have no use for either one of them,” Perrota says of Lay and Skilling.
As Skilling did his macho-boy routine on guys-only motorcycle treks through Mexico, the retirement funds of hard-working employees who believed in the company were flying off the in the dust: Showers lost $435,000 in her 401(k)—all her retirement security except for Social Security, which, no thanks to Bush’s privatization efforts, is still intact—and Perrotta lost $40,000 in her 401(k) and, ultimately, her house.
Showers, a former administrative assistant at Enron, and former Enron senior administrative assistant Perrotta, are watching the trial closely and will comment periodically as it progresses.
Only a few months before Enron gave its employees a 30-minute notice to clear their offices as the company declared bankruptcy, emptying its twin 50-story towers, Lay raked in $150 million in income, bonuses and stock packages. He still sleeps every night in one of his several mansions.
Skilling took in $25 million and is spending $23 million in lawyer’s fees alone. Less than a year before the company’s December 2001 bankruptcy filing, Enron handed out $745 million in payments and stock awards to 144 of its senior executives, including a whopping $54.6 million in retention bonuses to the very executives that drove the business into the tank.
When Enron’s stock price collapsed after revelations of financial irregularities, hundreds of thousands of investors and pension fund participants lost about $70 billion. Pension funds, including union plans, lost more than $10 billion.
Showers, who is working for a Houston software company where she is making $6,000 less a year than she did at Enron, and Perrotta, who works for the Texas Federation of Teachers in Dallas, are watching the trial closely and will comment periodically as it progresses.
In bitter irony, Enron’s collapse dovetailed with the demise of Perrotta’s husband’s international shipping company. R. Perrotta and Co. provided transportation consulting services for U.S. companies supplying material and other goods to several countries, including Iraq, after the U.S. invasion. But the bulk of the rebuilding business contracts went to Halliburton, the company formerly headed by the nation’s top quail hunter Vice President Dick Cheney.
Perrotta and Showers did receive some money back from Enron—but only after the AFL-CIO went to court and asked a federal bankruptcy judge to release severance money to thousands more who had not received any severance.
The AFL-CIO joined with the Harris County (Texas) Central Labor Council and the Rev. Jesse Jackson to meet with and convince new Enron CEO Stephen Cooper to pay $4,500 to nearly 200 workers who had received no severance.
In February 2002, the AFL-CIO again helped the workers go to the U.S. Bankruptcy Court of the Southern District of New York to release severance money to thousands more who had not received any severance. The judge tripled the $4,500 payment to $13,500 and eventually some 5,000 employees split about $35 million.
“They ought to be ashamed,” Showers says. “They hurt a lot of people. I feel sorry for those who worked a lifetime for that company and now they have no paycheck, while Ken Lay is running around with millions in his pocket.”
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